Office 365

A year is a long time in Office 365. Lots changes in that time, so it's good to go back and look at some PowerShell written to report Teams and Groups activity. Improvements can be made, advantage taken of changes made by Microsoft, and generally the whole thing can be tidied up and upgraded. PowerShell makes it easy to do - and to change if you don't like what I've done.

This post is sponsored by Druva's Office 365 backup solution. There’s no doubt that Office 365 is the most popular cloud services today. Microsoft launched Office 365 back in June 2011 and it has become a popular choice for the day-to-day work of both businesses and consumers alike. Office 365 is full-featured, easy to access,… Read More

Microsoft has announced the ability of the Planner web app to create multiple plans for an Office 365 group. This is a useful feature that Teams and SharePoint Online (the Planner web part) can already do, but some extra work was needed to break the connection between a plan and a group, and that's what Multiplan means. Or it means a spreadsheet.

Teams now supports memberships of up to 5,000 users. This is great for large tenants, but probably isn't too interesting for most of Office 365. If you're in the situation where you might need to operate very large teams, you might need Microsoft to make some changes to the client, write some tools, and impose some basic etiquette on Teams users.

Because I want to be your Valentine, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft’s weird criticism of its own product, a Windows 7 paid support leak, fake 5G network branding that needs to be taken down, Apple’s FaceTime bug, and much more.

In our industry, we are witnessing IT teams delegating and partitioning shifting responsibilities, often on an ad-hoc basis, with the organization leaders content to allow this adaptive strategy in the short term until problems or conflicts begin to arise.

Office 365 Groups and Teams make SharePoint much easier for people to use, with the price paid being the imposition of the groups permission model on SharePoint. On the upside, everything is very simple. On the downside, the permissions assigned to group members might not be what you want.

Secure (or private) channels is the biggest user request to the Teams development group, possibly because Slack has this feature. The only problem is that the Office 365 Groups membership model doesn't allow for filtering within a group, so introducing elements available to a selected set of members might create all sorts of difficulties for how Teams interacts with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.

Exchange Online transport (mail flow) rules are a powerful way to ensure that email from Office 365 tenants to specific recipients are encrypted in a consistent manner. Using rules relieves the need for users to become involved and makes sure that email is protected in a way that recipients can read messages. It's a good way to use the protection features built into Office 365.

Office 365 serves a wide spectrum of organizations. Many are very small, some belong to government agencies, and some are used by large enterprises. And in the enterprise space, mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are common events.

Because I live for the controversy, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft’s hypocritical attack on fake news, the irony of Microsoft employees stuck in “Reply All” hell, Microsoft’s big year in education, and much, much more.

The signs are that Office 365 will store more encrypted content as time goes by. But ISV products might not be able to process that content because they cannot decrypt it. All of which creates the prospect that you might archive or move data somewhere only to discover later that it is inaccessible. And that's a bad thing.